Admit it, you’ve been guilty of “Facebook creeping” before – so why not turn that attention onto your competitors’ Facebook efforts to turn that bad habit into productive business activity?

It may sound like a stretch, but knowing what works for your competitors in your industry can help you replicate their success. Now more than ever, companies need to know what their competitors are up to and what works best for them. Especially as Facebook keeps curtailing organic reach for brands with new algorithm updates.

Enter Facebook analytics by Keyhole.co. This tool can be used to reveal your competitor’s Facebook tactics, and compare them against your own actions. It tells you the best times to post, the optimal posting length and how to improve your fan page growth. You can even automate Facebook reporting with the help of this tool.

Let’s take a granular look at the information this tool provides. For this example we are checking Google’s Facebook page. On the first look, we see the page has over 20.55 million fans. They get over 1,400 likes, 300 comments and over 200 shares on an average on their posts.

The first part (page likes) is available for everyone to see. However, the average metrics is something you could hold as your benchmark against your competitors. This is when you ask yourself hard questions and see if your page is getting the same engagement as your competitors.

What can I do to improve my Facebook page engagement?

That can be answered by the data set available from the tool. Here below you can see the best posts by engagement. The Valentine’s Day post by Google has the most engagement with over 6,000 likes and 3,000 comments. One thing to note here is that four out of the six top posts are related to events and major dates such as Ireland’s Easter, a kickboxing match, and the Valentine’s Day. If Google was your competitor, you would want to start looking for events to plan your content around. That way you would have a good chance of improving your Facebook page engagement too.

In addition to the top posts, Keyhole shows the optimal character length for posts. In the case of Google, its optimal post length is between 0-140 characters. That tells us to that short posts work best, at least in the case of this page.

Note we could not use the other features since they require payment for Keyhole. This post shows the intelligence that can be gathered for free.

A tool like this can help your business not only see what your competitors are up to but also help improve your own Facebook strategy. Are you keeping track of other players in your industry? If yes, which tools are you using?